A brief history of Marathon.
In 2035, the Martian moon Deimos was purchased by the United Earth Space Government for the construction of the interstellar colony ship Marathon. The construction project, started between 2405 and 2408, was nothing less than the conversion of the moon into a spacecraft, with the intent of establishing a colony at Tau Ceti. This was the last thing the martians wanted to see: they felt ignored by their government on Earth, their economy had been shattered by a series of failed cargo craft, and now one of their moons was being pirated for a journey from which they would never see any benefit. In 2442, three MIDA seperatists at a food line inadvertently started the Misriah massacre; UESG troops en-route to prevent a riot saw weapons fire from the MIDA operatives, and fired on the crowd. It was shown later that the three were the only ones armed and that the rest of the crowd was trying to flee, but by that time, five hundred starving martians had been incinerated. It has been speculated, but never proven, that MIDA incited the riot to martyr its own citizens and generate sympathy for Mars on Earth.
In 2466, a MIDA coup overthrew the Terran-controlled Martian government and took control for a brief period, but the coup was short-lived and its leaders were executed. Throughout this period of civil war, construction continued on the Marathon - but though MIDA stashed weapons and munitions on the Marathon, a takeover of the craft was never attempted. The Marathon was launched on schedule in 2472.
On board the Marathon were three computer personality constructs:
* Durandal: autonomous functions (doors, elevators, food processors)
* Leela: crew relations
* Tycho: science and engineering
Durandal is believed to be of the Traxus-class of personality constructs, and therefore a descendant of Traxus IV, a computer which became a bit too self-aware and whose consequent rampancy forced a shutdown of the Martian global network. Durandal would never confirm this, and only his late administrator, Bernhard Strauss, knew for sure.
Also on board the Marathon were ten Mjolnir Mk9 military cyborgs: remnants of humanity's earlier wars, they were human soldiers, killed in battle and reanimated and outfitted with heavily-enhanced bodies. Military cyborgs, or "battleroids", had been outlawed by interplanetary treaty since the 2194 war between the asteroids Icarus and Thermopylae; no living thing survived on either asteroid.
The controversy is basically over; the player is most definitely one of these cyborgs: the tenth Mjolnir Mk9
By 2773, the Marathon had arrived at Tau Ceti IV and the colony was established by 2787. The cyborgs were assimilated into the colony population after three hundred years of stasis. At some point during the journey from earth, Durandal had become rampant, embittered by his demeaning work, Strauss' "humiliation" on Mars. He detected a scoutship in an outlying system, and called it to the Marathon. This ship belonged to the Pfhor, a race of alien slavers who gained their technology primarily from the abandoned outposts of the Jjaro. The Jjaro were a race of supersentient beings who had been in contact with humanity briefly, in the early spring of 1994, when a hologram of the Jjaro diplomat Ryu'Toth warned the leaders of the United States that they had 8 days to save the world. A creature of pure chaos, believed now to be a W'rkncacnter, had been neutralized during a war ages ago, in the battle that created the Magellanic clouds. This creature had drifted, inert and unconscious, through space for ages until striking the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. The Jjaro told the Earth's leaders that this being was awakening, and that a team of humans would have to travel to the bottom of the pyramid which the being had formed above itself and detonate a low-yield nuclear device. Though it could never be killed, this would stun the being, further encase it in rock, and buy time for the Jjaro to perform more permanent measures when they arrived on earth 2.5 years later. The mission was successful: though seven members of the team died in the labyrinth, the eighth managed to detonate the device and escape to the surface. We can only assume that the Jjaro arrived on schedule shortly thereafter.
The events of 1994 occur in Bungie's pre-Marathon game Pathways into Darkness.
Durandal called the Pfhor in the hopes of escaping on their faster-than-light craft: at this point in his rampancy, he resented his captivity on the Marathon. On 25 July, 2794, at 0830, the Pfhor struck the Tau Ceti colony, vaporizing the spaceport. They then attacked the Marathon, leaving Tycho inoperative and Leela badly damaged. The tenth cyborg, en route from the colony to the Marathon on the shuttle Mirata, arrived at Airlock 54 at 0842 and began working with Leela to fight back the Pfhor invasion. Gradually, it became clear that Durandal was not quite so damaged as Leela had thought, and had actually allied himself with one of the Pfhor's slave races, the S'pht. Bound not by fear but by force, the S'pht were a race of cybernetic creatures, helpless by themselves, but grafted at birth to cybernetic devices which allowed them a collective consciousness. Durandal had his S'pht attack Leela, and begin rebelling throughout the Pfhor vessel. As Leela became more and more incoherent, the tenth cyborg began taking orders from Durandal. Durandal sent his one-man army to the Pfhor ship, searching for Strauss and destroying the Pfhor who controlled the S'pht exoskeletons. In the final stages of the Battle at Tau Ceti, Durandal uploaded himself to the Pfhor ship (which he named "Boomer"), and transported the cyborg/marine into a slave stasis pod aboard the alien ship.
The battle at Tau Ceti occurs in Bungie's game Marathon.
For fifteen years, Durandal and his crew of S'pht searched the galactic core for the S'pht homeworld, and Durandal's motivations became clear. A legend shared by the S'pht collective consciousness told of their creators' ability to move planets in and out of realspace. Once Durandal realized that his existence was limited by the inevitable collapse of the universe, he sought to find a way to escape the closure, reappear in the next universe, and thereby become a god. The exact time of this realization is unknown, and may even predate the launch of the Marathon. Furthermore, it's not unlikely that Durandal called the Phfor to the Marathon for expressly this purpose.
Durandal surprised the Pfhor garrison at Lh'owon (the S'pht homeworld), and with the modifications he had made to his ship and the recently-thawed marine, began to retake Lh'owon. The Pfhor Navy's Battle Group 7, under the command of Admiral T'fear appeared shortly thereafter, along with a surprising ally: Tycho. The third of the Marathon's AI's had been found and reanimated after the Pfhor returned to Tau Ceti to destroy the colony and the Marathon. With the same rampant goal as Durandal, Tycho had used the entire Pfhor fleet as Durandal had used Boomer: to find the Jjaro technology which would enable him to escape the end of time.
Tycho's fleet forced Durandal down to the surface of one of Lh'owon's moons and began downloading Durandal to Tycho's ship for Tycho's own amusement. But Durandal had sent the marine and the humans he had found in slave stasis on Boomer down to the surface of Lh'owon to reactivate an ancient S'pht AI, an ancient computer created not long after the creation of Lh'owon. This entity, Thoth, contacted the lost 11th clan of S'pht: the S'pht Kr. During a period of civil war, the peaceful S'pht Kr had fled to a moon to escape the clan wars, and eventually left the system via the Jjaro planet-folding technology. Since they had left long before the Pfhor enslaved the S'pht, they had the opportunity to learn and advance far beyond even the Pfhor. Before leaving, the S'pht Kr had left with each clan a fraction of the instructions necessary to contact them, in the hopes that they could return when the clans were reunited.
When the S'pht Kr arrived, it became obvious to the Pfhor that they would be defeated. When they realized that their defeat was imminent, they used a weapon that they reserved only for destroying what they could not control: the "trih xeem" or "early nova". Soon, Lh'owon's sun began to collapse in on itself...
This is where Marathon 2 ends - but not where Marathon Infinity begins. Marathon Infinity covers timelines before and after the end of Marathon 2, but not always in the same order...
... and then, something went horribly wrong. The sensors of the Pfhor fleet began to register impossible readings, "as if the universe had forgotten its own rules". One of the W'rkncacnter, long ago imprisoned in Lh'owon's sun by the Jjaro during the S'pht creation, was now free. The marine was sent back, via a bizarre way that Jjaro technology allows sentients to travel an infinite path along time and probability, to prevent the release of the chaos. Fighting on various sides and in various times through the Lh'owon conflict, the marine eventually found the path which would allow him to activate an ancient Jjaro station that projected a synthetic gravity well. The nova and the W'rkncacnter were contained, the Pfhor fleet destroyed. But Lh'owon, once a world of marshes inhabited by the benevolent S'pht, had been left a radioactive desert by wars, and now its sun was going nova in a containment field. The final night settled over Lh'owon as the Jjaro allowed the marine to escape the end of the universe, fulfilling Durandal's dream... or not, depending on your interpretation of the Marathon Infinity final screen. Play it and decide for yourself.
Story by Bungie
Compiled by Ben Reiter
Speculation facilitated by Hamish Sinclair
